Website Upgrade

Yesterday my mayhematics website was unavailable due to the bandwidth limit being exceeded. This appears to be due to more people looking at it and downloading pages from it. There was a big spike at 4pm on Saturday for some reason. So I have had to upgrade to the next level, which about doubles the price to be paid each year to £60, which still seems very reasonable. At any rate I hope this resolves the problem. Perhaps I should look into ways of charging for donwloads.

I'm also thinking of registering some other domain names, since the subjects covered on the site do not all fall logically under the "mayhematics" heading, they have all accumulated in one place due to previous service providers closing down or not continuing to provide support, and due to changes from dial-up, to cable broadband, to telephone-line broadband connections.

Probably it is about time to upgrade my computer as well, but I dread all the problems that that could throw up so will probably leave it to the last minute as usual when it will be unavoidable.

My Chequered Career

I've been considerably expanding the pages of My Chequered Career in the Chess Problem section of my website. This is intended to provide a record of my chess problem compositions and the ideas they illustrate. Besides well known pieces like Grasshopper, Nightrider, Leo and Mao, the additional pages also include the other bifurcating hoppers Eagle and Sparrow, and the Clockwork Mouse, as well as variants like Antipodean Chess and Arrow Chess. There are still a lot of compositions to be added. I was hoping this exercise might stimulate me to do some more composing eventually.

Website Improvement and Expansion

This week I've been making some major additions and revisions to my mayhematics website. In the first place I have reverted to an older style for the home page, using the rainbow colours to classify the subjects into six sections, and doing away with the three intermediate index pages. I'd really like the six sections, and the centre one, to be circular but square is the best I can do at present.

The next big change is to the Variant Chess section, due to the closure of the BCVS. All 64 back issues of Variant Chess magazine are now available for download from the Variant Chess page. Most of the labour of scanning the magazines, apart from the first eight issues, was done by Peter Fayers to whom thanks are due. At the bottom there is also a link to the list of books and journals which I collected over the years and were part of the BCVS Library, but which I'm now calling the Variant Chess Library. It occupies a bookcase and some boxes in the entrance passage to my flat.

The other change is the addition of a series of pages of short biographies, mainly of radical reformers in the humanist movement, but also including notable scientists and others (there will be many more to add). Some of these were written for the Leicester Secular Society website, and others I had prepared as notes for a series of talks on the History of Humanism. Many have now appeared in shorter form on the Humanist Heritage site maintained by Hamish Macpherson for the BHA.

All in all a very productive week.

Archiving the Ether

I've been trying to sort out all the files in the "My Documents" section of the computer. These included several lists of "Old Favourites" from previous computers. Naturally a lot of these coincided with those on my current list, but a surprisingly large number of old links have just vanished into the ether. There were quite a number on the "geocities" site which it seems Yahoo took over and closed down. There are now a number of archiving sites where old web pages are kept, for instance the British Library now has a webarchive, and there is an American internet archive based in San Francisco.

This week I received another letter from Professor Donald Knuth, enclosing four chapters on knight's tours from his forthcoming "Fun and Games" book. They cover non-intersecting knight paths, celtic tours (which include no minimal triangles), tours on three-rank boards, and longer leaper tours. As might be expected his idea of "fun and games" extends to some quite complicated mathematics. I'm naturally pleased to see that quite a number of my own results are quoted.